Does he know how to read or write? Ne zna, brate! (No, brother!) . . . Finally Avdo came, and he sang for us old Salih's favorite of the taking of Bagdad in the days of Sultan Selim. We listened with in- creasing interest to this short homely farmer, whose throat was disfigured by a large goiter. He sat cross-legged on a bench, sawing the gusle, swaying in rhythm with the music. . . . The next few days were a revelation. Av- do's songs were longer and finer than any we had heard before. He could prolong one for days, and some of them reached fifteen or sixteen thousand lines. What Parry found in the months that followed exceeded all his hopes. By the time he returned to America, in Septem- ber, 1935, he had collected no fewer than twelve thousand five hundred epics and other songs-tales of the great Serbian de- feat by the Ottomans at Kosovo, of the deeds of long-dead Balkan heroes-and had accumulated a ton of aluminum re- cording disks. Parry, once described as "the Darwin of oral literature," died shortly afterward, in a shooting accident, at the age of thirty- three; but his work revolutionized under- standing of the Greek classics. Yet even while Parry was at work the oral tradition was beginning to die out in the cities and the more developed parts of Yugoslavia. Since then, it has all but disappeared as a living institution. In India, however, an even more elab- orate tradition had managed to survive, relatively intact. An anthropologist friend had told me how he once met a travelling storyteller in a village in southern India. The bard knew the Mahabharata-Indià s equivalent of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Bible, all rolled into one. The epic is the story of the rivalry of two sets of princely cousins whose enmity culminates in an Armageddon-like war on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; at its heart lies the Bhagavad Gita, for many Hinduism's most profound and holy text, a dialogue, on the eve of battle, between the god Krishna and one of the princely heroes about duty, illusion, and reality. With its hundred thousand slokas (stanzas), the Mahabharata was more than six times the length of the Bible. My friend had asked the bard how he could possibly remember it. The minstrel re- plied that each stanza was written on a pebble in his mind. He simply had to re- call the order of the pebbles and "read" from one after another. Indià s population may not be particu- larly literate-the literacy rate is sixty per cent-but it remains surprisingly erudite culturally, as Wendy Doniger, an Amer- ican Sanskrit scholar, has pointed out. Anthony Lane noted in this magazine in 2001, in the aftermath of the attacks on the United States, that the people of New York again and again compared what had happened to them to films: "It was like 'Independence Day'''; "It was like 'Die H d '" " N ' D . H d 2 ' " I ar ; 0, Ie ar . n contrast, when the tsunami struck at the end of 2004, Indians were able to reach for a more sustaining narrative than disaster movies: the catastrophic calamities and floods that fill the Mahabharata and the Hindu tradition in general. As Doniger puts it, "The myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. The great myths may help survivors to think through this unthinkable catastro- phe, to make a kind of sense by analogy." While the Mahabharata is today the most famous of the Indian epics, it was originally only one of a large number. During the Mogul period, for example, one of the most popular was the Muslim epic Dastan-i Amir Hamza, or the Story of Hamza. The brave and chivalrous Hamza, the paternal uncle of the Prophet, journeys from Iraq to Sri Lanka, via Mecca, Tangiers, and Byzantium, on the way falling in love with various beautiful Persian and Greek princesses, and all the while avoiding the traps laid for him by his terrible foe, the dastardly magician Zumurrud Shah. Over the centuries, the factual under- pinning of the story was covered in layers of fantastic subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, and sorcerers-in one of its most popular forms, the tale encompassed three hundred and sixty stories. Today, how- ever, while children in Persia, Pakistan, and parts of India may be acquainted with some episodes, the Story of Hamza as a whole no longer really exists as an oral epic. There are fears that the Mahabha- rata and other Hindu epics could share that fate in the twenty-first century, sur- viving in written or recorded forms only. Given all this, it seemed extraordinary to find in modern Rajasthan performers who were still the guardians of an entire self-contained oral culture. Apart from anything else, I longed to know how the bhopas, who were always simple villag- ers-ploughmen, cowherds, and so on- and often illiterate, could remember such colossal quantities of verse. Recently, hav- ing moved back to Delhi after an absence of ten years, I decided to go in search of the bhopaswho had preserved this ancient tradition. It would, I felt, be a little like meeting Homer in the flesh. T here were several full-fledged Rajas- thani epic poems that the bhopas per- formed, but two were especially popular. One told the tale of the deeds, feuds, life, death, and avenging ofPabuji, a semi-di- vine warrior and incarnate god who died